Tag Archives: Voice of the Customer

The truth behind takt time

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A few months ago my wife ordered a hole punch from Amazon one evening. It cost £5.49. The following morning at 8.00 there was a knock at the door. The hole punch was delivered.

That really is as much as I know for a fact about Amazon’s business processes. I was, therefore, shaken by an item on BBC News alleging Amazon workers face ‘increased risk of mental illness’. I don’t think the quotes make that anything other than an alarming headline. The item trailed a BBC documentary The Truth Behind The Click. UK readers can see the documentary here on BBC iPlayer. I thought that I would wait until I watched the documentary before I commented.

Having now watched it, I think it is difficult to draw any conclusions from the programme. Its tone was so plainly tendentious. The BBC had sent a covert reporter with a video camera into an Amazon warehouse, he having misrepresented himself as a job seeker. Some of the video, taken from the perspective of an Amazon employee picking in a warehouse, looked to me as though it was shown speeded up.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot, an expert in public health, was shown the video, I presume the same limited and selective one shown on the BBC. He observed that:

The characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows, increase the risk of mental illness and physical illness.

Sadly there is no analysis. We were not told what characteristics, what the supposed levels of safety or what the supporting evidence. There was no quantitative data drawn from more than one individual.

Part of the problem with the programme was, I think, that three principle issues have been conflated here.

  • The general nature of repetitive manual work.
  • The psychological impact of working to an externally set “drum beat”.
  • The physical and cognitive effects of working at a particular rate.

Repetitive work

Repetitive work has always been with us. Some people find in it dignity and liberation. The Buddhist practice of samu, repetitive physical work performed with mindfulness, is part of Zen spiritual dicipline and the quest for enlightenment. Conversely, socialist pioneer William Morris believed that we should all be composing epic poems in our heads while sat weaving at the loom.

That being said, such work is not for everybody. I got the impression that Amazon were fairly clear to new employees as to what was involved. This is where recruitment is a key business process, identifying people who will fit with this type of role and stick with it.

However, I see nothing in general sinister about such work.

Drum beat

What delivered that hole punch so quickly was the “drum beat” that regulates work along the supply chain. This is a fundamental part of the Toyota Production System and lean operations generally.

The takt time specifies the rate at which products are being despatched to customers. That sets the rate at which pickers need to work. If the pickers work too quickly then packages build up in front of the despatch area. If too slowly, the despatch area stands idle. Both entail cost or delay that has to be passed on to the customer. The customer suffers.

The programme interviewed workers who felt the “drum beat”, announced through the bleep on a hand held electronic scanner, dehumanising. The BBC journalist clearly shared their view. The workers felt this deprived them of autonomy. They felt that they were not encouraged to think of [them]selves as human beings.

We do not show enough respect for boring work. We tend to sentimentalise and even glamorise the sort of active participation in work that too often results from having to resolve a non-conformance, a defect, a delay or an emergency. That is not useful work, no matter how much satisfaction it offers the employee.

I sometime sense a bien pensant nostalgia for the days when millions were employed in repetitive tasks on piece work. I think the BBC especially self indulgent on this matter. Piece work of course incentivises a worker to produce as much as they can even if that increases costs to the company in storing it until it can be used, if it ever is. The benefit of the drum is that the worker is required to produce no more or less than society needs. The laudable aim of lean operations is to reduce waste, Toyota use the Japanese term muda.

What I think was missing at Amazon was engagement of all employees in improvement. The usual quid pro quo for diligently following the drum is that part of the day is spent off-line in improvement work where an employee can, if so inclined, exercise their ingenuity. However, I am aware that the BBC reporter was recruited for the Christmas rush. That is not a period that anybody devotes to improvement work. Production is king. Improvement should have been prioritised earlier in the year when volumes were slow.

I think though that there is still an opportunity for a periodic review of the voice of the customer with all staff. It is focus on the customer that ultimately legitimises and justifies the discipline. I think Amazon staff would appreciate being reminded of just how quickly their orders are getting to customers, the variety of desires satisfied so promptly and the volume of transactions despatched, all through their discipline and focus on the drum.

Perhaps Amazon do this but the reporter didn’t stick around long enough to hear.

Work rate

This is the toughest part of the allegations to analyse. Was the takt time just set too quick for human capability? There is probably some flexibility in setting the rate for any individual as capacity can be increased by employing more pickers. There must be some limit on the number of pickers as the warehouse aisles will only accommodate so many on the move. However, as I said above, I found the overall tone of the programme so tendentious that I cannot take its criticisms at face value. No analysis by Professor Marmot was presented. Amazon have serious legal obligations to provide their workers with a safe system of work and to carry out health surveillance. Amazon have to cope with the real costs of absenteeism, staff turnover and litigation. I would be surprised if they had not analysed work demands thoroughly and diligently.

I do confess to feeling uncomfortable at the practice of terminating employment on the third consecutive day’s sick leave but, ultimately, it is a matter for Amazon.

I think that my conclusion from watching the programme is that it is critical to maintain all employees’ extrinsic motivation by the voice of the customer through constant review and emphasis of how an individual’s discipline contributes to the overall market impact. Goal deployment helps. Beyond that, I’m not persuaded by the BBC’s criticism.

On forecasting as the slave of our passions

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Last weekend I was reading Dominic Lawson’s Sunday Times (London) review (10 November 2013) of Normal Greenspan’s recent book The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting. Lawson expresses his astonishment at what Greenspan says.

I and other economic forecasters didn’t understand that markets are prone to wild and even deranging mood swings that are uncoupled from any underlying rational basis.

I have to share Lawson’s astonishment. After all, Greenspan was the man who criticised the markets’ irrational exuberance back in the 1990s.

Lawson usefully reminded me of an important observation by eighteenth century philosopher David Hume.

Reason is … only the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office.

Perhaps computer pioneer Marvin Minksy put it in a more colloquial way.

Logic doesn’t apply in the real world.

That is something that we have to be very wary of in the management of an enterprise. Whatever the consensual mission, it is ultimately under threat from narrow decisions by individuals, or self-reinforcing groups, that might be influenced more by emotional reactions to local events than by an appreciation of the organisational system. I think that there are some things leaders can do to minimise the risks.

Firstly, put key measures on a process behaviour chart and run it continuously. This provides a focus for discussion, for testing opinions and for placing decision making in context.

Secondly, formalise periodic reviews of process capability accompanied by a reappraisal of, and immersion in, the voice of the customer. Communicate this review widely. Do not allow it to be ignored or minimised in any discussions or decision processes.

Thirdly, just be aware of the risks that decisions might be emotionally founded with only post hoc rationalisation. Keep an eye on people who chronically avoid engagement in the process behaviour chart and capability study. Be mindful of your own internal thought processes. They are certainly less rational than you think.

I think that with those precautions organisations can harness the positive emotions that generate enthusiasm for a product or process and passion for its continual improvement.

Richard Dawkins champions intelligent design (for business processes)

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Richard Dawkins has recently had a couple of bad customer experiences. In each he was confronted with a system that seemed to him indifferent to his customer feedback. I sympathise with him on one matter but not the other. The two incidents do, in my mind, elucidate some important features of process discipline.

In the first, Dawkins spent a frustrating spell ordering a statement from his bank over the internet. He wanted to tell the bank about his experience and offer some suggestions for improvement, but he couldn’t find any means of channelling and communicating his feedback.

Embedding a business process in software will impose a rigid discipline on its operation. However, process discipline is not the same thing as process petrification. The design assumptions of any process include, or should include, the predicted range and variety of situations that the process is anticipated to encounter. We know that the bounded rationality of the designers will blind them to some of the situations that the process will subsequently confront in real world operation. There is no shame in that but the necessary adjunct is that, while the process is operated diligently as designed, data is accumulated on its performance and, in particular, on the customer’s experience. Once an economically opportune moment arrives (I have glossed over quote a bit there) the data can be reviewed, design assumptions challenged and redesign evaluated. Following redesign the process then embarks on another period of boring operation. The “boring” bit is essential to success. Perhaps I should say “mindful” rather than “boring” though I fear that does not really work with software.

Dawkins’ bank have missed an opportunity to listen to the voice of the customer. That weakens their competitive position. Ignorance cannot promote competitiveness. Any organisation that is not continually improving every process for planning, production and service (pace W Edwards Deming) faces the inevitable fact that its competitors will ultimately make such products and services obsolete. As Dawkins himself would appreciate, survival is not compulsory.

Dawkins’ second complaint was that security guards at a UK airport would not allow him to take a small jar of honey onto his flight because of a prohibition on liquids in the passenger cabin. Dawkins felt that the security guard should have displayed “common sense” and allowed it on board contrary to the black letter of the regulations. Dawkins protests against “rule-happy officials” and “bureaucratically imposed vexation”. Dawkins displays another failure of trust in bureaucracy. He simply would not believe that other people had studied the matter and come to a settled conclusion to protect his safety. It can hardly have been for the airport’s convenience. Dawkins was more persuaded by something he had read on the internet. He fell into the trap of thinking that What you see is all there is. I fear that Dawkins betrays his affinities with the cyclist on the railway crossing.

When we give somebody a process to operate we legitimately expect them to do so diligently and with self discipline. The risk of an operator departing from, adjusting or amending a process on the basis of novel local information is that, within the scope of the resources they have for taking that decision, there is no way of reliably incorporating the totality of assumptions and data on which the process design was predicated. Even were all the data available, when Dawkins talks of “common sense” he was demanding what Daniel Kahneman called System 2 thinking. Whenever we demand System 2 thinking ex tempore we are more likely to get System 1 and it is unlikely to perform effectively. The rationality of an individual operator in that moment is almost certainly more tightly bounded than that of the process designers.

In this particular case, any susceptibility of a security guard to depart from process would be exactly the behaviour that a terrorist might seek to exploit once aware of it.

Further, departures from process will have effects on the organisational system, upstream, downstream and collateral. Those related processes themselves rely on the operator’s predictable compliance. The consequence of ill discipline can be far reaching and unanticipated.

That is not to say that the security process was beyond improvement. In an effective process-oriented organisation, operating the process would be only one part of the security guard’s job. Part of the bargain for agreeing to the boring/ mindful diligent operation of the process is that part of work time is spent improving the process. That is something done offline, with colleagues, with the input of other parts of the organisation and with recognition of all the data including the voice of the customer.

Had he exercised the “common sense” Dawkins demanded, the security guard would have risked disciplinary action by his employers for serious misconduct. To some people, threats of sanctions appear at odds with engendering trust in an organisation’s process design and decision making. However, when we tell operators that something is important then fail to sanction others who ignore the process, we undermine the basis of the bond of trust with those that accepted our word and complied. Trust in the bureaucracy and sanctions for non-compliance are complementary elements of fostering process discipline. Both are essential.

Trust in data – III – being honest about honesty

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I found this presentation by Dan Ariely intriguing. I suspect that this is originally a TED talk with some patronising cartoons added. You can just listen.

When I started off in operational excellence learning about the Deming philosophy, my instructors always used to say These are honest men’s [sic] tools. From that point of view Airely’s presentation is pretty pessimistic. I don’t think I am entirely surprised when I recall Matt Ridley’s summary of evolutionary psychology from his book The Origins of Virtue.

Human beings have some instincts that foster the greater good and others that foster self-interest and anti-social behaviour. We must design a society that encourages the former and discourages the latter.

When wearing a change management hat it’s easy to be sanguine about designing a system or organisation that fosters virtue and the sort of diligent data collection that confronts present reality. However, it is useful to have a toolkit of tactics to build such a system. I think Ariely’s ideas are helpful here.

His idea of “reminders” is something that resonates with maintaining a continual focus on the Voice of the Customer/ Voice of the Business. Periodically exploring with data collectors the purpose of their data collection and the system wide consequences of fabrication is something that seems worthwhile in itself. However, the work Ariely refers to suggests that there might be reasons why such a “nudge” would be particularly effective in improving data trustworthiness.

His idea of “confessions” is a little trickier. I might reflect for a while then blog some more.

Trust in data – II

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I just picked up on this, now not so recent, news item about the prosecution of Steven Eaton. Eaton was gaoled for falsifying data in clinical trials. His prosecution was pursuant to the Good Laboratory Practice Regulations 1999. The Regulations apply to chemical safety assessments and come to us, in the UK, from that supra-national body the OECD. Sadly I have managed to find few details other than the press reports. I have had a look at the website of the prosecuting Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency but found nothing beyond the press release. I thought about a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 but wonder whether an exemption is being claimed pursuant to section 31.

It’s a shame because it would have been an opportunity to compare and contrast with another notable recent case of industrial data fabrication, that concerning BNFL and the Kansai Electric contract. Fortunately, in that case, the HSE made public a detailed report.

In the BNFL case, technicians had fabricated measurements of the diameters of fuel pellets in nuclear fuel rods, it appears principally out of boredom at doing the actual job. The customer spotted it, BNFL didn’t. The matter caused huge reputational damage to BNFL and resulted in the shipment of nuclear fuel rods, necessarily under armed escort, being turned around mid-ocean and returned to the supplier.

For me, the important lesson of the BNFL affair is that businesses must avoid a culture where employees decide what parts of the job are important and interesting to them, what is called intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is related to a sense of cognitive ease. That sense rests, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, on an ecology of unknown and unknowable beliefs and prejudices. No doubt the technicians had encountered nothing but boringly uniform products. They took that as a signal, and felt a sense of cognitive ease in doing so, to stop measuring and conceal the fact that they had stopped.

However, nobody in the supply chain is entitled to ignore the customer’s wishes. Businesses need to foster the extrinsic motivation of the voice of the customer. That is what defines a job well done. Sometimes it will be irksome and involve a lot of measuring pellets whose dimensions look just the same as the last batch. We simply have to get over it!

The customer wanted the data collected, not simply as a sterile exercise in box-ticking, but as a basis for diligent surveillance of the manufacturing process and as a critical component of managing the risks attendant in real world nuclear industry operations. The customer showed that a proper scrutiny of the data, exactly what they had thought that BNFL would perform as part of the contract, would have exposed its inauthenticity. BNFL were embarrassed, not only by their lack of management control of their own technicians, but by the exposure of their own incapacity to scrutinise data and act on its signal message. Even if all the pellets were of perfect dimension, the customer would be legitimately appalled that so little critical attention was being paid to keeping them so.

Data that is properly scrutinised, as part of a system of objective process management and with the correct statistical tools, will readily be exposed if it is fabricated. That is part of incentivising technicians to do the job diligently. Dishonesty must not be tolerated. However, it is essential that everybody in an organisation understands the voice of the customer and understands the particular way in which they themselves add value. A scheme of goal deployment weaves the threads of the voice of the customer together with those of individual process management tactics. That is what provides an individual’s insight into how their work adds value for the customer. That is what provides the “nudge” towards honesty.